Did Citi Just Confiscate $1 Billion In Venezuela Gold

Just over a year ago, cash-strapped Venezuela quietly conducted a little-noticed gold-for-cash swap with Citigroup as part of which Maduro converted part of his nation’s gold reserves into at least $1 billion in cash through a swap with Citibank.

As Reuters reported then, the deal would make more foreign currency available to President Nicolas Maduro’s socialist government as the OPEC nation struggles with soaring consumer prices, chronic shortages and a shrinking economy worsened by low oil prices. Needless to say, the socialist country’s economic situation is orders of magnitude worse now.

According to El Nacional, “the deal was for $1 billion and was struck with Citibank, which is owned by Citigroup.”

As Reuters further added:

On paper yes – very much as any comparable gold leasing operation conducted by sovereign nations with central banks – but the actual physical gold would be transferred to an unknown vault of Citi’s choosing where it would become an asset controlled by the bailed out US bank.

We note this peculiar gold swap case because something curious took place overnight. On the same day that Venezuela announced it would seize a local Kimberly-Clark factory after the US consumer-products giant announced it would shutter its Venezuela operations after years of “grappling with soaring inflation and a shortage of hard currency and raw materials”, Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro said on Monday that Citibank planned to shut his government’s foreign currency accounts within a month, denouncing the move by one of its main foreign financial intermediaries as part of a “blockade.”

Among the many reasons why the sudden departure is surprising is that due to strict currency controls in place since 2003, the government relies on Citibank for foreign currency transactions, meaning that suddenly Venezuela’s financial “blockade” is indeed about to get worse.